The Problem Doesn’t Need to Be Solved
Note from the Editor
When we are stuck on an important but difficult problem, we don’t typically consider that giving up on it could be the most productive option.
What would happen if we did?
(Have you?)
—Ellen
The Problem Doesn’t Need to Be Solved
Most of the time, we have smallish problems that we know we can solve with a little research, a little action, or maybe some creative exercises.
Occasionally, we become stuck on a difficult problem: there is something we want to achieve, or something we want to stop from happening, and none of the options to solve it that we can come up with seem to work. Maybe the options that other people can think of don’t seem any more promising.
When we find ourselves seeking a solution to a problem for a long time, or implementing a solution that is difficult, there might be a better option—giving up.
If you have spoken to James about change, you have probably heard this story:
A trainee of Jay Haley’s was badly stuck in a family therapy case. Haley asked the trainee what the problem was, and was told “the symbiotic relationship between mother and daughter.” Haley replied, “I would never let that be the problem.”[1]
Haley recognized that it was time to give up all efforts to solve that particular problem. It was the trainee’s orientation towards that problem that was getting in her way, not her inability to come up with a solution to it. When the trainee sought advice, she was asking for a new solution to her problem. She was not considering that her inability to solve the problem might indicate that there was an issue with the problem itself.
Typically, when we think about “thinking outside the box” or approaching a problem with creative solutions, we’re thinking about finding ways to approach the problem that we haven’t thought of before. People come up with all kinds of novel, helpful and ingenious solutions by abandoning one way of approaching a problem that isn’t yielding results and seeking others.
As Haley showed, we can also abandon the box and look for another.
A problem is always our own formulation of what is getting in the way of something we want. As a formulation, and not a fact (though our formulation is, of course, grounded in facts), we can learn to recognize that when we think about a problem, we are not considering the way things are. We are engaging with a creative tool.
We are allowed to abandon problems because they are hard.
When we regard problems as tools rather than as objective statements about the world, we can raise our standards for what tools we are willing to use in pursuit of an objective.
When Do We Need to Reject the Problem?
I recently saw an article that Edna Quealy shared on LinkedIn[2] that inspired me: “How have Icelandic teenagers gone from the biggest drinkers and smokers in Europe to the healthiest in 20 years?” by Emma Young.
The story is about how campaign leaders and researchers rejected the traditional approach to the problem to find a more effective solution:
Traditionally, the work had focused on individual behavior change: getting teenagers to abstain from alcohol or drugs. But the campaign leaders in Iceland believed that the focus on “saying no” missed the big picture… What if drug and alcohol use came to feel abnormal in their world rather than normal?
The team identified healthier alternatives that could fill the same need that teens were filling with these unhealthy habits, like dance, music, drawing, and sports, and started providing them to teens for free.
There are two ways to look at why this team was able to come up with a novel solution that worked better than the existing approach:
One way to look at it is that they took the problem (“teens need to stop abusing substances”), rejected the current approach (“teens need to be encouraged to say no”), and sought a novel approach to address the problem (“find out how to make drug and alcohol use feel abnormal to teens rather than normal”).
The other way to look at it is that they rejected the problem (“teens are drinking and smoking because they aren’t abstaining enough, and we don’t know how to make more teens abstain”) because they saw that all attempted solutions to this problem were not leading to substantial gains, and they decided to choose a different problem, landing on “drug and alcohol use feels normal to teens. How can we make it feel abnormal?”
I acknowledge that these are two different ways of saying the same thing. The difference between them is only what the problem was taken to be, so it is semantic by definition.
Whether the campaign leaders and researchers rejected the current approaches to the problem or rejected the problem itself depends on what conversation was going on at the time that was enforcing the shared assumption that this was the problem.
I think it is likely that the shared conversation was about how to find a more effective way to help more teens abstain from drinking and smoking, and so their rejection was not just a rejection of the approach to the problem, but a rejection of the problem itself.
It’s helpful to consider whether they rethought the approach or replaced the problem because remembering that it’s possible to do both expands the number of possibilities that we can become aware of.
The Hardest Part: Recognizing When the Solution Is a Problem
When we are searching for a solution to a problem that we haven’t solved yet, we can remember that we can look for a new problem if we get stuck. When there’s already a solution to a problem in place, like there was for the teen substance use problem in Iceland, it can be harder to reconsider the solution or the problem because there’s an extra step. First, we need to recognize that the solution in place is inadequate.
Discovering or admitting this is a big step in itself. The “saying no” approach to the problem of teenage substance abuse has been in fashion in multiple countries for decades. Various ways of saying no to drugs were taught to me from Elementary school onward in health class and in posters around schools. It took courage to consider that telling teens to say “no” to drugs is not the best idea.
Many times, we take it for granted that the results we are getting are the results we should be getting, so we don’t imagine that we might be solving the wrong problem.
Our “stuckness” can even reinforce our sense that we are doing something right—we may not have figured out how to solve the problem, but at least we are aware that the problem exists and are working towards solving it.
A good indication that the solution is inadequate is that the problem hasn’t gone away.
For instance, it took me years to realize that one of my worst habits was going to the gym. For a long time, my problem was that I couldn’t get myself to be healthy consistently. I continued to try to address my motivation until I had a conversation with someone that made me realize – why am I assuming that this is the only or best way to be healthy? Is it really healthy to think that health requires spending hours a week gritting my way through something I hate?
When I stopped trying to solve the problem of being unmotivated to do something that I consider torture, I discovered that I love dance. Even when I can get in one hour a day, it doesn’t feel like enough. I haven’t solved my problem of how to motivate myself, I’ve made it irrelevant.
Two Questions
If you are stuck on a problem, what happens when you entertain new ideas about what problem to choose to solve, or get a second opinion on what the problem could be?
What happens when you consider that certain problems may be clues about what outcomes are important to you, but aren’t actually problems worth solving?
Further Reading
If you’re interested in more thoughts about how we can expand our notions of what we can achieve, take a look at our article, “Achieving the Impossible.”
© Copyright 2022 Ellen Arkfeld
The moral right of the author has been asserted
[1] O’Hanlon and Wilk, Shifting Contexts, New York: Guilford Press, 1987, p. 79
[2] Special thanks to Paulo da Costa for sharing this post